Re: Fadawana si Buruda

On Sun, 26 Aug 2007 23:25:17 -0700, Joseph Fatula <joefatula@...> wrote:
>Foolish mortal!  You dare inquire about the arcane lore of the
>Conlanging Secrets (TM)???  Okay, I'll tell you.
>
>In this language, you need to know three things to define a consonant:
>its place of articulation, its method, and its voice.
>- There are three places of articulation: labial, dental, and velar.
>- There are three methods, roughly: stop, nasal/approximant, and fricative.
>- There are three "voices": voiceless, voiced, and prevoiced clusters.
>
>As every syllable is phonemically CV, you don't have to worry about
>clusters.  There are only three vowels: a, i, and u.  This means that
>every syllable is defined by four variables: place, method, voice, and
>vowel.
[...]

Are you, perchance, a Set player?

I once made a layout for a linguistic Set deck, with the constraint that the
other player was an English monoglot so I couldn't include anything outside
our lect of English.  Going with CV syllables this meant 9 Cs [p t k   b d g
  m n N], and 9 Vs [& 6 A   e(I) @ o(U)   i I u], making the four features
place, method+voice, height, backness.  The [I] wasn't entirely
satisfactory, but I pretended it was [1] or at least [I\].

Anyway, this makes me wish I'd looked closer at your systems of alternations
when you posted them as puzzles.  I got as far as noticing that you had an
involution on the consonants, but gave up at that point, partly, I'm ashamed
to admit, 'cause the nonnaturalism of the scheme looked unrewarding.  A
nicely done system.

>The whole point of this was to come up with another method of alteration
>than the ones usually used; affixes, infixes, umlaut, etc., as this is
>intended to be a non-human language.  Does this system do that, or does
>ANADIEW?
Let's just say I would be violently floored if ANADEW.  I don't think I've
heard of any theory of phonology that could cope with things like the value
of one parameter just copying wholesale the value of a totally unrelated one.

Alex

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